The Digital Transformation of the Church w/ Darrel Girardier

Hey guys, Frank here with another episode of Modern Church Leader, a poem for today's show man. We're going to talk about kind of digital transformation with my buddy, Darrel, all the way from Brentwood Baptist. Darryl, it's good to have you on the show man.

Thanks, Frank. Thanks for having me on.

We were chatting before. I mean, it's been a long time, so it's good to reconnect and we both have middle schoolers we do. You know we won't talk about that on the podcast, but you know we have kids going into middle school, so we're in that stage of life, which is awesome.

Yeah, it's yeah. You put a lot more effort into prayer than you previously had.

I will say again, not the topic of the show, but you have a boy going into middle school. I do Okay, so I have, you know, my boy's going into middle school. I feel like parenting is getting actually more complicated, like harder, not easier, and people often like, say like, oh, boys are easy and whatever, but I like, as they're getting into, like they're not teenagers yet but they're headed that direction middle school, I feel like you know it's getting more emotional, right, like the heart is a bigger part of it and that's way harder than just Way harder Regular keep you alive stuff.

Yes, it is. It's like, yeah, I always say like, look, my job is to keep you alive. Like if I can do that it's a win. But then, like all of a sudden, around that 11-year-old, 10-year, 11 year old, it's like my wife and I are like when did we get the teenager? When did he show up? Like it's like nobody notified. I didn't get like an Apple notification on my phone that says your teenager's arrived. Yeah, and apparently he did.

Oh anyways. Well, it's good to see you, man. So I mean, let's just kind of jump in Like why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself and how you? You know what you do at Brentwood and how you got into ministry and serving in your role? Yeah, god, give us the short version of the journey.

Yeah, so I'm a Brentwood Baptist church. We're located in Brentwood, Tennessee. We've got nine locations all throughout the middle Tennessee area. I oversee communications, which is basically everything you think from like digital, which is like the web media, mobile design, video, post production. It's a whole wide range of things, along with the social media as well. Before that, I spent 12 years as a career director at Lifeway Christian Resources, and so I always said I would never go into church, never do church work. And then, all of a sudden, I was like I maybe would do it. And then, all of a sudden, I was actually close friends with our senior pastor, and so we just began this dialogue of what would it look like to help the church transition into the new world. And you know, before you knew it, I'm all of a sudden I'm here on staff at church. I'm now going on 10 years, which I can't believe I'm saying that.

So you've been working for churches or in the that's like 25 years.

Yeah, it's 25 years. So, yeah, it's a space that I've known really well. And on the side, you know, I've also had the opportunity to work and create like a. I created a co-creative Facebook group called Church Communications. I think right now they're at 25,000 members. That was a fun thing to do. It was a fun thing to start that community. So this is a world that I've kind of been immersed in straight out of, straight out of college, and so I've enjoyed it thoroughly. Yeah, yeah.

I love it. I love it. Communications is a lot for churches. A lot of churches like Brentwood is a big church you know, serves a lot of people in that community, been around for a long time Most churches don't have a comms person, let alone a comms like team, that's doing all the things. So you kind of have a unique, somewhat unique. I mean there are plenty of churches out there that have you know what you guys do. But if you take the 300,000, 300,000 and some odd thousand churches in America, you know probably 80% of them don't have like a comms person full time, right, some volunteer doing what they do in social media and that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I think social media kind of changed that a little bit where, like you're right, it was one of those things where you don't have a lot. This is a unique position, yeah. But within that, a lot of pastors saw and understandably said wait, we got this thing called social media. Somebody's got to do that and I joke a lot of times it was a student minister, if there was one. They just like I say like they just threw the keys to like Facebook and said here, can you do something with this? And so that's kind of morphed.

So I find more and more churches are like I've actually had a lot of consulting with churches where, like I've had conversations are like we need to build this thing out. I don't know what it's going to look like for us, and so we start having the conversations of like what's the first thing we need to bring on board? What are the volunteers we need to get? So the good news is, I think it's a growing field and it's one of the churches are realizing it's more important. I think social media is one of the catalysts for that. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean social media, and then probably COVID.

Yeah, covid, yeah, covid.

Like, maybe the second thing that, like not even catalyst, it just forced every church to get more digital. I'd love to hear your perspective, like how has, since you've been 10 years at the church, how? What has the progression been like? What have you seen? How has it changed all the way into? Like, what does it look like today?

Yeah. So when I came on board, we were heavily invested in a very much a print-based culture where everything was like you had the weekly bulletin. Every quarter we did a magazine. Our website had no mobile mobile functionality. Like there was no mobile version of the website, it was just there was the website and then you had an app and all it really did was play the sermons. So, and the team and the volunteers were all based around that process and so we had like three graphic designers, because you know it, just you start thinking through that, you're going to go, wow, it's really heavily based on this, on the, and all of our systems and processes were based around that.

So over time, we had to ask the question like what do, what's our in game, what are we really trying to do? And we started asking those questions about disciple-making and what that looks like, and we started saying, okay, we're. Also, where is our people, where does the person in the pew? And so when I started doing it, I started pulling just pulling numbers from Google analytics. I was like, hey guys, every year our mobile growth is three to 5%. So every year that number that's at 50 is going to be at 55, 60, 70, it's going to incrementally grow. And so you start asking those questions and start pointing stuff out. So what we had to do was, over time, we had to kind of set a vision for where we wanted to be and then figure out and help team members. Certain team members were like I'm spot and sold into this vision. And then certain team members were like this isn't really where I might see my gifting, and so we had to help, kind of help off board them, help find new opportunities for them and bring new people on board.

So it's not, I will tell you, it's not been easy. It's been painful in some respects. Painful because we still have what I would call some legacy things that people really held onto Bulletin. The Bulletin, yeah, the Bulletin. It's just this day I still get where's the Bulletin. I'm like you know and I understand that I really, I do, I want and actually honestly I think we've come to realize what this is forced us to do and I think in a good way is we do print on occasion, we do do some stuff that's like an actual hard artifact, but what it does, it makes that thing so much more special. So we're about to celebrate our pastor is retiring after 32 years of ministry here at the church. So I'm going to do a full on magazine with, like big picture, big images of big spreads of all the work he's done, just beautiful historical images, and we're going to print like 2000 copies of it. I could I do that as like a mobile page. I totally could have. But people are going to want to hold on to, they're going to put it on their coffee table. So I think in some respects it's made that stuff much more special, but it's.

But the digital has also forced our team to be a lot faster. It's forced us to figure out how do we separate ourselves from the crowd. And that's what digital for us has done is it's asked the question like, okay, if we just go get it graphically everybody else and post the graphic online, great, we're like everybody else. But what's the thing we can do that contextualizes our stuff, that makes it feel like, makes it feel like us, but makes our audience, resonates with our audience, because there's authenticity there. So what that means is staffing-wise.

It means I had to like I had to get more photographers and say your job is to be an area event and then you're going to catch that thing and within a matter of 30 minutes, I want everything on Instagram Like. It's that kind of like speed For us. I think one of the digital things that we had to walk through was when you it's okay to go, like hey, we're going to be a little less creation mode and a little more documentation mode Like it's okay to like just document and go, document and go and the audience is going to reward us. And then analytics for us have shown us over time that when we do stuff like that, the audience always rewards us.

Like I'm thinking about like that transformation. What happened, like once COVID hit or after you came through COVID or whatever. I mean it's like I hate. I don't hate it, but you know, it's like a weird question because we're three years out, kind of thing.

But, I think it was a moment that like really changed a lot of churches and you know those like ripple effects are still kind of playing out to some extent and you have a unique view in terms of what you were mentioning pre-show right, Like the going more digital and COVID being a bit of a catalyst in that direction, Like what's changed for you guys even since then.

Yeah, I think for us, what's changed for us is that we began to realize for us is that our people actually want to gather together. And I think beforehand it was like you know, there was when we did an event. It was like you know it's, it is what it is, like, okay, we're doing an event, that's great. Now, all of a sudden, I think what's changed versus people actually have a longing and a hunger actually to be near other people. So it's kind of funny. What it's forced us to do is become a little more event-based in the sense of like, how do I capture, how do I, how do I tell the story of an event, how do I make you kind of think I'll have a little bit of FOMO about missing out from the event, right, and that's because, again, our, our event attendance numbers are through the roof.

So for that there's been that change post-COVID where we didn't think that was going to be the case. We thought everything was going to be online and then our people snap back, almost kind of the pendulum swung in such a way that was like, wow, that's that's not what we expected, right, but from a digital perspective, it's made us sit there and go. We had a zero based a lot of things and we had to go, so time out. For the last 18 months we've been able to get away without having any bulletin, without doing certain things, and I'm sitting going. What if we don't bring those things back? Right? What if?

like what really matters now, yeah, so, like, the question we asked was was like, okay, if I'm not printing the bulletin, what if I just outsourced all of our graphic design? Like there's wonderful places that can do it for a flat rate. They'll do X, y and Z, right? Well, that was a huge like shift and my team was like so, yeah, I was like, so what if we got rid of all the designers and said, instead, we'll take all that money and let's, let's spend that money on people who can either develop the digital side force or capture stuff that we can then put on all of our platforms? That was a huge post-COVID thing for us, because the team radically looks different At that point and so, and we're still, we're still tweaking that, but I think for us the pain was I think for me was, honestly, with some team members that probably have always, who I would say they got the mission confused with the method, and so what happened was, for a lot of us, one of the pain points was they were so locked into certain methods that we had to say we had to remind them of the mission and say, hey, we got to change our method if we're still going to do this mission.

And that was probably a philosophical shift of guys lose the method the way you've always done it. Lose that method because that method is no longer accomplishing that mission and for a lot of team members, a lot of you and volunteers, they were like I don't know if I can do that. So, as a leader, for me that was probably one of the hardest things I've had to walk through is walk people through like the fact they've done the same thing for 15 years. A certain way we're not going to do it that way because they were just so in love with the method that we had to go back and remind them of the mission.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. What does the team look like today? Number of people on the team. What roles you have them in?

So we, the way we do it is, we have I actually have one we have one art director or senior graphic designer. I have somebody who over in then. So then I've got one full-time photographer. I got one full-time person who's solely focused on short-form videos, I think YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels. Then I have one person who coordinates all of that, who basically think of it like they have a master map of all social media accounts and they're just making sure all the buckets are full. So you've got that.

I have one team that's our storytelling team. So they're two video producers who solely focus on really storytelling, long-form video. And then I've got what I would call because we're a multi-site I've got three project managers who manage all the projects, because just all the little time they're doing stuff, like they're doing the digital bulletin, all of those type of things. I've got a developer who handles the website, whose job is developing, keep that thing up and running along with some other stuff, and then I have somebody overseas all the digital side and somebody overseas all the promotions. So that's kind of the framework of the team. And then I've got a couple of administrative help. But we kind of divide the team up into two sections. We have the creative side and the project management side. So that's kind of how the two things are branched out.

Yeah, short-form content is fascinating. One of my kids I mean kind of one of them, for sure YouTube shorts is like literally all he watches, like if he's watching something, like he's at home he's playing some video game with friends online and he's got YouTube shorts playing. Yeah, it's the craziest thing you know. And then another one of my sons is super into like Action figures like Marvel and Transformers and that kind of stuff, and so he's watching Videos.

These ones usually aren't shorts, but he's watching YouTube again and it's, all you know, just YouTube content that people are creating. But shorts are fascinating to me because it feels like, like that, that style is what's winning right now.

It is. It is so we. It's so funny. We looked at the analytics yesterday and we didn't realize that YouTube has now become our most popular channel for all of our content. We're like hey did, did somebody check that?

I was like no, it doesn't surprise me, though, like it really does when I watch my kids and I know they're just. You know, this is my little, you know yeah thing here. But I'm like man, YouTube, it's like, and their shorts are just, yes, overtaking Instagram and all the others like, little by little. It's not. I mean, the other platforms are very big, but, right, you know, youtube already has this built-in user base.

Yeah, so for us, with some of the some of the realizations we had was with with the short form video was, really, there was almost two categories, in the sense that when I'm on, say, like Instagram reels and Instagram stories, for that matter, we're gonna, our goal is, we're gonna try to hit our local audience. That's what that's, that's what it's about. But when I get to shorts and tick-tock, we started noticing we would have stuff go viral, if you will, but it wasn't people liked by people that we had it. We're in any of our networks, right, people outside that. And so I told the team. I said you need to think about Instagram as a still a social network and Facebook and all that that. But when? So, when we get to YouTube shorts and we take talk, think of it like Netflix, our car it is. It is a different distribution channel by which there's different, different ways of how it's getting out to our audience. So we've had to think through, like, what is that? What does that mean for how we create content? So Are we gonna put that much effort into a distribution that may or may not hit our target audience who lives in a five mile radius around us? Right, that we could do that. So it's.

This is one of things that we're honestly we're wrestling with. We had a comfort, we had a long meeting yesterday about this, but short-form video for us, like if we get the right, get the right audio, that the trending audio with the right thing, you two other things hit. And the other thing for me as a leader is where I've had to be okay with is is They'll give me something and I'll kind of go that's. I would not watch that in a million years, but I realize I'm of a certain age, of a certain demographic and that's not who we're trying to reach. Yeah, and sure enough, nine times, not ten. I'm wrong, right.

I'm old, you don't get it anymore.

I don't, and I'm okay with that. I don't, I don't vibe, as the kids say these days. I Mean when you have an employee look at you say I just need some time to vibe. I'm like I don't know what that means, but as long as you're hitting your deadlines I don't care Totally. Oh.

That's good. Yeah, that's too good. Yeah, it's, it's fascinating. So what, like? How much effort do you guys spend in like trying to reach people online? Like I'm thinking like you know, doing church online, you obviously are probably doing that, you're doing, obviously the social media and web and all the things Are you? Are you guys focused on like I'm trying to reach new people and bring them in the building via my online channels, or or do you think about it differently, like what's the, what's the point? Yeah, what are you trying to do? Yeah, so, our.

I think for us, we really think of it's like. It's probably twofold. One is we're trying to reinforce our current audience. That's already bottomed to who we are. Okay, and it is. It is probably encouraging slash equipping, if you will, as much as you can equip online on in some way shape or form. So there's there's that aspect of it.

For us, though, when it comes to reaching our audience, we found in the day you gotta spend them, you have to spend money to do that. So for us, it's really about ads. Our ads actually perform quite well on Google and on Instagram. When we did Easter, we were super thrilled with that. So our focus on that is is we are definitely going out for somebody who's new to the community or hitting certain criteria, so that's where we'll spend that effort. But if I'm just creating stuff that's like I know it's gonna go an Instagram story, it's really for our audience that's already Bought into who we are. I don't think we're going to pull people in the ads, and so that's why, if you what? If you would look at our stuff that's on our Instagram Our Instagram account and the developer ads they look totally radically different. Right, because the ads are low hanging fruit easy call to action. You know it's versus the, the Instagram stories, which is try to be a little more deep or dive into some stuff. Try to be more a little theologically rich, if you will, on that kind of stuff.

So, but our in-game, but like the online church, all that stuff, I mean we've come to a realization that, like, we do have people that watch us online and they will check us out before they come into a brick and mortar. We are the firm belief that if we do any of that stuff, it's we're driving into the brick and mortar. We want you to actually physically come worship with us. We're never going to do the thing where we're gonna do an online church in an online small group a lot of churches. That works well for them. That's part of their DNA. It's just this, was it? So they go back to the COVID thing real quick.

We were having a serious discussion about do we hire an online pastor? Do we have this and do we have this, and I was like it's you guys, we can do all this. I just can tell you that in 18 months, our DNA is going to revolt and it's going to. That person's gonna feel pushed out because, all of a sudden, this stuff is gonna die and we I mean, to be honest, we had a really hard conversation. We were had some heavy disagreements, right, and I Think we I was. I was proved right 18 months later, when I've got a lot of friends who I love dearly at churches who are online pastors. They're no longer online pastors. They're now moved into a different role in the church. So we had to come to that realization of what we want is true to our DNA as a church, and we realized that was not really true to our DNA and that was okay, right, that we were gonna survive and that's we were gonna be fine.

Yeah, I mean that's actually really cool because I I just think that's true for every church. Right, like what, what is your church and what are your strengths? And I think Hope it forced every church to get better at doing things online, like like all the things, or hopefully made everyone better. But you know, I think you're you know, your average church in America like Can't do church online and church in the building well, because they don't have enough resources or staff. And then you're a big church Going. Look, it's just not. It's not even our DNA. It's not about doing it well or not. Like you probably could do it well if you chose to force it and, like you know, push it through for us, but but it's not your DNA. So let's just do what we do really well, let's have the online stuff. Like you probably still stream services and do some of the basics, but You're not like really focused on making that, like who you are.

I yeah, I say like a lot of times when it comes to churches and like the digital transformation is is, you have to look back at your DNA and you have to ask yourself what was the genesis of the church Like, how did it start? Because those things are always gonna be very deep inside of your church. They are so, like if you were a church that was born in the tip-talk area, instagram area era, you were probably gonna have an easier time making that transition because you were from day one, you were all digital right. But if you were like us we are churches 50 plus years old you, we can get there. You just have to understand there's a lot of stuff that May not translate, that's gonna take time to get there, and some stuff that will never translate right, right, just won't yeah, okay, let's jump into.

I like us the talk of the hour. I'm fascinated by it, but AI is Overtaking the world. Everybody doesn't probably matter what age you are. At this point you're hearing about AI, or hearing about chat, gpt or All the things, and you work in a space where I think the tools you know, the AI tools that are popping up actually are really helpful. So, yeah, how are you guys thinking about AI, especially, you know, in the context of digital transformation and your team kind of morphing and changing as things go, and all that like, what's your, what's your take? Let's start there. What's your take on? So?

AI. So about 18 months ago I would say about 18 months ago, if you notice I didn't mention I have an editor on staff or copywriter on my staff. When I gave you that Staff list yeah, and that was 18 months ago I did have one and then I brought her into my office and said, hey, I want to, I want to show you some of these tools that I've been playing around with, and One of them was Jasper. Yeah, and she looked at me and she goes am I gonna be out of a job? And I was like look, I love you, you were not getting ready, you know you're fine. And then she was like but eventually she decided God called her way to to another ministry and I was like look to the team said we're not hiring that person back, right? I said between Grammarly, between Jasper and between these things, we can recreate our editor, right. And I would tell you I get it gets about stuff, about 85%, right. Yeah, the other 15% is like we wouldn't say that let's do this, let's tweak that, let's we go. But a couple things we've been playing with and we've been having fun with is I took all my pastor's sermons and I uploaded it to chat base and basically created a chat bot where you could have a conversation with our pastor, right and and that freaked him out a little bit. I didn't, side note, tell your pastor you're going to do that before you actually do that. I didn't do that, I just did it and that was a lot. But that kind of gave us some ideas of like what the future is gonna look like for us in terms of some other things we're looking. We're looking at. But some of the things that was really helped us For us is is that we do a weekly podcast.

Well, the thing with the weekly podcast is based off of the sermon and so that means I've got to listen to the sermon, I gotta create questions. Well, now I have a tool that just upload the entire sermon. It turns around, gives me the outline of the sermon, gives me what they think what study group questions would be. It basically does all the work and then turns around, creates me the podcast description, keywords, basically within a matter of 30 minutes it does what takes about two hours from the right is done right, the. The other thing we've been playing with is that we're looking at a tool that basically we could upload it and then it'll convert the Whole thing, along with the tone of the voice, to a different language. So I've been playing with. I played with it and did a Version of our podcast, which is a four-person podcast. I did in Spanish and it was my wife was one of the co-hosts and I was like that sounds like my wife, a Spanish version of my wife. Wow. So that's gonna give us the ability to like because we do have a Spanish ministry. It's gonna allow us to Kind of do some additional Cool things.

And then there's obviously on the design side. You know we've gotten to the point now where, like, we can move really quick on just doing little things. Like that person that photo is not smiling. Okay, right, do x, y and z. Another spot. So there's that low-hanging fruit.

But for us, I've told the team I said Look, don't look at this like it's replacing you. Look at it Like it's a new tool to put in your toolkit. And and if you embrace it as a tool in your toolkit and you learn how to master the tool, you will all of a sudden become a lot more effective as a team member, right? So that's for us. It's a lot of like. The low-hanging fruit was the editorial stuff. That was easy stuff. The heavy lifting for us is in the next I would say 18 months as the video and the audio gets better. That's what we're gonna do, a deep dive into. We're going to spend a lot more time. We had already played with synthesis and I already created some avatars, by which we had some talking head videos that were not real people. We've already played with some of that, but we're I think we are about 18 months away from us fully Having that whole a workflow built just solely based on AI doing a lot of those things for us.

I mean, it's what do you most, what are you most Like, wowed by or shocked by in all of this? Because it sounds like you're me actually actively like you're doing stuff with these tools. I.

Yeah, I think what I think for me, what has gotten me, it's not the video, audio, deep fake stuff or whatever, like I knew that was. That's always this is is this is, on some level, it's the natural language capabilities, which I think is Really fascinating to me. That I'm, I feel like I'm having a dialogue with the machine and then the right and chat Gbt comes back with something that feels authoritative answers, but it could be completely wrong, mm-hmm, but it's acting like it's right and I get why people would go oh yeah, that's right. So for me, my dream scenario is this is that I'm going to be able to pick three or four theological textbooks that our church has said yes, yes on these. Yeah, I'm able to take my pastor's sermons. I'm going to take certain versions of the Bible. I'm going to slam it all together and create a chatbot that says do you have a question? Yeah, ask the chatbot. In 24, seven people can ask this chatbot questions and I know, within a certain degree of accuracy, it's going to get the person exactly what we want the person to get them Right. That to me, exciting.

What it means for me in my role is I have to walk alongside ministers who feel like am I being replaced? I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. Your job was not a feel. Your job was not to be Wikipedia for theology Right, we're not training people to win Bible quizzes. We're training people to do disciple makers Right. Chat, the AI can't do disciple making Right. That is still so. Again, it's parallel to the conversation about mission versus method, and so, while I had to walk my team through that, part of my role in general for the church as a whole is to walk the church through these type of changes. So that's what excites me. But again, I know that change curve is going to come. It's going to be kind of difficult for some of our folks.

We've been working on a tool for a couple of years now called Sermonly. So it's sermon writing for pastors, right, yeah, but you know it's free. It's this fun thing. It helps you with organizing and some stuff. But then AI hits and we're like, okay, now this thing is interesting, right, and what you just described like these, like you know, theology books, these versions of the Bible, the pastor stuff, maybe I don't know, maybe you're a denomination and you say everything from this denominational like material, put it in, yeah, all in there. And then then pastors can like kind of have a sermon writing, research assistant, co-pilot type of thing, right, that's kind of based on their body of whatever you want to call it research. Right, like their kind of core stuff. Like, is your pastor, you got a new one coming in? Like is that something that you're chatting with them about?

or like using chat GPT even to do some of this.

Yeah. So I showed my pastor a sermon that I created with chat GPT. He decided to write a blog article about it and then it got picked up by the Associated Press, which I just laughed at because his point was, in some respects, that pastors have to realize that the sermon you preach is the one you live, for your life is how you live your life. It's not going to be what's on the stage. So I think for me, yeah, we're walking through that, we're talking through what that looks like in for them and I think for some of them, that's they don't want to live in that world. Again, we have nine campus pastors and some have varying degrees on. Some are like I'm not into that, some are like I'm going to totally embrace that. So, yeah, it's walking them through that and saying like it's going to be okay. So I'm excited. But you know there's definitely some fear, interpretation.

AI writing my sermon, I think would freak any pastor out, right, yeah, but AI being your because every pastor is, you know, prompted by God, by the spirit and some things on their heart and then they're they're sort of building a sermon and then preaching a sermon based on lots of things, right, like God's prompting the Bible. Obviously, your life experience, what's going on in the church, like all the stuff kind of gets brought into what's coming out. But they all do research, right, like they all, they all, or some some pastors have like teams, right, like help with sermon writing and doing research and all that kind of stuff. So to me it's more like the research side, the the like I'm looking for scriptures or, you know, like stories or connecting dots from this part of the Bible to that part of the Bible, like all the stuff you're doing to kind of do research. That's where this becomes like a superpower.

Exactly, yeah, exactly, and that's the way I look at it. It's like a superpower, it's a research assistant tool and I think for some pastors and some churches it may be even going back to saying I need to go back and redo my job description Because I think what you, what you really need me ultimately to do, again, it's middle of mission method. Again it's hey, this, I may not spend 30 hours now researching a sermon. Okay, so now I've freed up 20 hours, right, what's the best way I can spend the 20 hours to help us figure out how we get accomplished our mission? And so for some leaders, some guys will be a struggle. For some leaders, that'll be like a huge weight off their back, right, okay, wow, now I can. Now I can do mentoring. Right. Now I can do coaching, I can invest in younger leaders.

So to me, that's that's what's like you said I love like, exactly like leadership training, disciple making mentoring like all those things that you know I guess should be part somehow.

Yeah, in there, right, I know every kind of pastor can be, like different churches do different things, but yeah, it's free up a bunch of time. It should, it should, yeah, and it's at some point. I'm going to send you a link to sermon Lee. I just want to get your feedback on it, because I think you're living in that world and it would be cool. Yeah, well, like before we wrap, I'm asking a few rapid fire questions. But like what, before we get there, I mean what, where's your head right now? Like AI, these tools, like digital transformation, like what are you seeing in the church and in the world that you live in? Kind of, where are we where we headed?

So I think I think what I would say is that I think we are probably on the precipice of every 500 years, the church goes through some massive transfer, transformation, and it's typically not to get too long winded. But here's the thing is is we know that if you look at what we call general purpose technology, so that would be a thing that like something that everybody eventually adopts TV, cars, automobiles If you look at the cycle and the cycle of general general purpose technology, so if you look at the cycle we're in, we have seven technologies that we've. We've got in the first word you're 2023. So we've adapted a lot of technology really fast. That typically means, historically, that we're about to.

The church has got to reimagine its identity, significance and purpose, like, what does it mean to be the church in the world? And I think AI was kind of like this tip, I think iPhone, all that stuff. I think AI to me is AI and I would even say I'd go say is AR and VR, given what Apple announced is like the tipping point that all of a sudden is going to push us into this thing. So my, my head is kind of going. We got to be okay with a lot of things breaking right. A lot of things are going to break. Denominations are going to break, social structures in terms of how we organize are going to break as a church. They just are going to do that. And the good news for me is is I think, at the end of the day, the local church that part I don't think is going to break is just all this apparatus is around us are probably going to change, right. So it's an exciting time because I think you get to. You get to reimagine what the local church looks like. You get to ask yourself, hey, if we don't have to have all these staff, because AI is now answering the phone for us and, you know, doing all this other stuff, where can we deploy those resources somewhere else? Right, I think? Now it's. I think, the ability for you to imagine this now, for me to start a church, to build a website, to have a podcast recorded, to have them do all this stuff I can literally do all this stuff with AI. So much stuff with AI Now that, like all the heaviness, administrative lifting, is just like gone away For us to plant churches. We should be able to do more rapid rate. We'll be able to do a lot more things. So for me it's it's an exciting.

I'm actually I used to be, I used to be a real big pessimist and I would tell you, over the last 18 months I've turned into this big optimist because the more I've seen it actually work yeah, and then more I've seen people embrace it, the more I'm like, oh no, this is actually a really good thing. It's gonna be painful, but it's a really good thing. But I think we are in that Martin Luther 500 years ago he taxed the nine in five pieces up on the board and that's like the whole world just changes. I think we're we're on the precipice of that again and we're gonna have a new. It's gonna be a, it's gonna be a fun ride, I would say, as we try to figure out what that looks like, yeah, it is gonna be fun.

I mean, it's gonna be fun for those who embrace it. It's gonna be painful, yeah, who? Who like resist Right, like it's here, it's happening. This AI thing is like steamrolling and then everything that will, I guess, come as it relates to AI and all the tech. But yeah, I love that. Okay, a couple quick rapid-fire questions. Yeah, first one Give me a book that you just think everybody should read.

It Could be any, any kind of book like doesn't zero to, let's go with zero to one by Peter teal. Oh, love it.

Love it, bring it, bringing it, bringing it all the way into the tech world. I like it.

Yeah, yeah, that's up, that's a. That's a fantastic book. That is just. He's just so black and white, and so he Again. He gives you a really good way of framework on how to think about the future. Yeah, which is why I like that book, love it.

Okay, yeah, give me a podcast that you're listening to right now.

Uh podcast. I'm listening to you right now, though, let's go with oh, let's go with deep questions by Cal Newport, who wrote, who wrote deep, who wrote deep work digital minimalism I hit. So much of his work I've read, and Digital minimalism, I think, is like for every believer, I think it's almost I want to make it a must read, because he just he gets to some, he gets the heart of the Crux of how to navigate a digital world without losing your soul. I love that's great.

I mean we all need that right our kids needed. We need it. It's parents trying to help our kids, like all the things, so those are great. Man, tell us where we can go to learn more about you or connect with you online working listeners.

Probably easiest thing to do is probably hit me up on either LinkedIn or Instagram. I'm just, it's my last name, last name G I R AR D I E R, but most likely LinkedIn actually is where, surprisingly, like first one I don't know again, I'm probably the first one say LinkedIn, say LinkedIn, you win. Frank, I'm turning into an old man. Let's just, let's just, let's just state the facts. I'm promoting LinkedIn. I I'm not vibing with you on this one, darrell, I'm, I'm clearly I don't know. I mean, you can say Twitter, but like I always joke like Twitter's where people get fired, so I don't spend a lot of time there. I mean, just like, hey, for those you don't know, I'm Southern Baptist. I did, four weeks ago, have to give a speech in front of my entire staff, said just do me one favor, stay off of Twitter during the Southern Baptist.

I'll do that I can. We'll all be happy.

I can ask you your take on the vote. I was there, we were tightly as a sponsor. Oh yeah, we were there, surprised we didn't run into each other. But We'll just leave that one be. We won't even, we won't even jump into that.

Well, I'd like to keep. I'd like to keep my job, frank. Thank you, I appreciate it, darrell.

Thank you, it's been awesome, man. Thanks for coming on the show today. Dude, thanks for having me. Thanks, guys. We'll catch you on next week's episode, see ya.

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